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What should be the approach to track push notifications?

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Hello! We have a mobile application with push notifications provided by Firebase. I’m trying to find some information about using Amplitude with push notifications.

What I’d like to do:

  1. Track push sends events via server-side API
  2. Track push notification clicks (is it even possible?)
  3. Track opens from push notifications (it is implemented yet)

I was trying to implement 1st before but I faced a problem that all users become “active” users because of server-side events. So, I saw them in DAU but actually they were offline, I just send an event that the push was sent.

 

My questions:

  1. Is it possible to exclude server-side events from counting of the DAU?
  2. Is this approach good?

Thanks a lot,

Stan

Best answer by Saish Redkar

Hey @sshvaika 

Amplitude recommends sending events like push-notifications or email sent to your end user as server-side events.

The easiest and most common way to tackle your problem is to mark such events ( which aren’t tied to a direct action performed by the user ) as “Inactive” so that they don’t count towards your DAUs. Setting an event's activity status to inactive will remove that event from any dashboard metrics counting active users and active events. 

You can read more about marking your server-side events as inactive here. 

Hope this helps!

 

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5 replies

Saish Redkar
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  • Saish Redkar
  • Expert
  • 1377 replies
  • Answer
  • July 21, 2021

Hey @sshvaika 

Amplitude recommends sending events like push-notifications or email sent to your end user as server-side events.

The easiest and most common way to tackle your problem is to mark such events ( which aren’t tied to a direct action performed by the user ) as “Inactive” so that they don’t count towards your DAUs. Setting an event's activity status to inactive will remove that event from any dashboard metrics counting active users and active events. 

You can read more about marking your server-side events as inactive here. 

Hope this helps!

 

Saish | Connect with me on topmate.io/saish_redkar for supercharging your Amplitude skills
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    sshvaika
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  • sshvaika
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  • 1 reply
  • July 21, 2021
Saish Redkar wrote:

Hey @sshvaika 

Amplitude recommends sending events like push-notifications or email sent to your end user as server-side events.

The easiest and most common way to tackle your problem is to mark such events ( which aren’t tied to a direct action performed by the user ) as “Inactive” so that they don’t count towards your DAUs. Setting an event's activity status to inactive will remove that event from any dashboard metrics counting active users and active events. 

You can read more about marking your server-side events as inactive here. 

Hope this helps!

 

Thanks a lot! It really helped.

D
  • Dheeraj Gour
  • New Member
  • 1 reply
  • December 24, 2024
Saish Redkar wrote:

Hey @sshvaika 

Amplitude recommends sending events like push-notifications or email sent to your end user as server-side events.

The easiest and most common way to tackle your problem is to mark such events ( which aren’t tied to a direct action performed by the user ) as “Inactive” so that they don’t count towards your DAUs. Setting an event's activity status to inactive will remove that event from any dashboard metrics counting active users and active events. 

You can read more about marking your server-side events as inactive here. 

Hope this helps!

 

Hi Saish,

Thanks for your response! It was really helpful.

However, it looks like the link you shared to handle inactive events might be expired. Could you please send another link or some updated documentation on how to mark server-side events as inactive? I’d appreciate it!

Also, I noticed in the logs that even when the app is in a "kill" state (completely closed), the APIs are still being called, but the Amplitude event is not being sent. Could you advise on how to handle this scenario properly?

Specifically, I want to ensure that I can log a “notification received” event and associate it with the user's timeline. This way, the data remains accurate, and the events don't affect other metrics like DAU or active user counts.

Thanks again for your help!

Saish Redkar
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  • Saish Redkar
  • Expert
  • 1377 replies
  • January 13, 2025

This link might help - https://amplitude.com/docs/data/change-event-activity-status

Saish | Connect with me on topmate.io/saish_redkar for supercharging your Amplitude skills
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  • RobertConry
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  • 13 replies
  • March 18, 2025

To track push notifications in Amplitude, you’ll want to log both when a notification is sent and when a user interacts with it. A common approach is to track an event like "Push Sent" with details like message ID and timestamp. Then, when a user opens the app from the notification, track a "Push Opened" event. If your provider supports it, you can also log "Push Delivered" for more accuracy.

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